Artie Shaughnessy is a man with a dream and a wife named Bananas. On 4 October 1965, both the Pope and a Hollywood producer will pass through Queens, New York and Artie's life, putting his dreams on a collision course with a devastating, wildly funny reality. Artie is a failure, his wife may be schizophrenic, his son wants to kill the Pope, his best friend steals his mistress, and four characters die, one of them murdered before our eyes. Naturally, this is comedy, since Guare knows that nothing is funnier than the clash between American dreams and the American way of death. The House of Blue Leaves is a wild, funny and moving play, in touch with the darkest intelligence, unsparing in its fundamental concern with public lunacy, and cold-bloodedly accurate. Guare presents illness and neurosis in a starkly humorous way what would make Woody Allen blanch. The play won two Drama Critics Circle Awards as well as the Obie and four Tony Awards. It was the play chosen to open the new Lillian Baylis Theatre, London, in 1988, in a production starring Denis Quilley, Nicola McAuliffe and Helen Lederer. John Guare is also the author of Six Degrees of Separation which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1992, and also became a successful and highly acclaimed film.| 23 Nov 00 to 2 Dec 00 | The Maddermarket Norwich, Norfolk Performance Details => Venue archive |
